A2 | Tuesday, December 1, 2015 | SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS AND MYSA.COM
PAGE 2
The words of a messenger certainly matter
Words don’t matter.
That’s what Carly Fiorina
must mean when she lectures
those of us who suggest that
language can provoke violence,
the sort that erupted last week
at a Planned Parenthood clinic
in Colorado. It’s what the GOP
presidential candidate must
have meant when she accused
such critics of “demonizing a
messenger.”
Words don’t matter.
That’s what Sen. Ted Cruz of
Texas must mean when he
mocks the media for noting the
gunman told authorities “no
more baby parts,” a reference to
controversy stoked by Cruz,
Fiorina and others in their party over the practices of Planned
Parenthood. It’s what the GOP
presidential candidate must
have meant when he responded,
“It’s also been reported that (the
shooter) was registered as an
independent and a woman and
BRIAN
CHASNOFF
OPINION COLUMNIST
a transgendered leftist activist.”
A Cruz spokesman explained
the senator was just making a
point about “misinformation.”
Other words for “misinformation” include “hyperbole,”
“distortion” and “fabrication” —
the sort of rhetorical tactics that
Fiorina and Cruz and others in
their party have used to feed the
controversy over the practices of
Planned Parenthood.
Words do matter, of course.
Cruz and Fiorina and other
aspiring leaders understand
this well enough to use words
as weapons to claim political
victories. But these sorts of
words can also inflame people,
some of whom are unbalanced
enough to use real weapons to
wreak real damage.
That’s what police say Robert
Dear Jr., 57, did on Friday when
he killed three people at the
Planned Parenthood clinic in
Colorado Springs.
“No more baby parts.”
That’s an echo of language
used by Cruz, who issued a call
to investigate Planned Parenthood for the “sale and transfer of aborted body parts.” It’s
an echo of language used by
Fiorina, who accused Planned
Parenthood of “harvesting baby
parts,” including a live fetus’
brain.
These words matter, not least
because they’re untrue.
Selling tissue for profit is
illegal. In some states (not Texas), Planned Parenthood legally
donates fetal tissue to researchers who use it to develop treatments for diseases such as HIV
and Parkinson’s. In the past,
Planned Parenthood has sought
minimal reimbursements for
expenses such as transporting
tissue.
Nonetheless, Cruz has referred to Planned Parenthood
as a “criminal enterprise.”
Last summer, indicted Texas
Attorney General Ken Paxton
echoed this at the state Capitol
while testifying at a Senate
Health and Human Services
Committee meeting. He began
by falsely claiming that a secretly recorded video showed
Planned Parenthood “essentially selling body parts of aborted
babies.”
Paxton shared in detail what
his staff had seen touring a
Planned Parenthood facility in
Houston: an aborted child, its
“fingers and toes exceptionally
tiny but fully formed.”
Like the words used by Fiorina and Cruz, this is language
used to inflame.
Anyone who uses words like
this should not act shocked,
then, when they actually inflame people, including unstable ones.
Sometimes, it is the messenger’s fault — especially when
the messenger is lying.
This is a point being made by
many in the media since the
Planned Parenthood attack. It’s
a point worth repeating. Language should clarify, not distort
or derange.
If this country feels distorted
or deranged to you right now,
listen to some of the loudest
voices to understand why.
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AF chief tells history of brave pilots
By Sig Christenson
STAFF W R I TE R
The Air Force’s top
commander, Gen. Mark
Welsh III, took on the
role of a professor Monday, outlining a history of
aviation that always
boiled down to one thing
— brave airmen.
Welsh, a San Antonio
native in town for the
day, recalled that Col.
Marc Sasseville and his
wingman, Maj. Heather
“Lucky” Penney, were
prepared to ram their
F-16 fighters into a hijacked airliner thought to
be headed to Washington, D.C., on 9/11.
They had no weapons
to bring it down.
“It was a pretty simple
briefing. Sasseville told
Lucky Penney, ‘I got the
cockpit,’ and she responded, ‘I got the tail.’ ”
Welsh was the kickoff
speaker for the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce’s Military City
USA Speaker Series at
the Depot at Sunset Station. Mixing slides and
video, he outlined the
history of American
military aviation, some of
it made in the Alamo
City.
There was the first
military flight by 1st Lt.
Benjamin Foulois on
March 2, 1910. There was
Charles Lindbergh, who
flew the first solo flight
across the Atlantic and
had earned his wings in
San Antonio. There was
Jimmy Doolittle, who
served here before the
famous Tokyo Raid.
Today, all enlisted
airmen train at Joint Base
San Antonio-Lackland
and some of them, Welsh
said, have served with
distinction. He pointed to
Penney and Tech. Sgt.
Zach Rhyner, among
others, as examples of
the Air Force’s core values: integrity, service
before self, and excellence.
Rhyner received the
Air Force Cross for his
role in a 2008 battle in
Afghanistan. Shot in the
left leg and under constant fire, he controlled
more than 50 attack runs
from aircraft that sometimes dropped their
bombs a little more than
100 yards away.
Penney, describing an
order to intercept United
Flight 93, a Boeing 757
hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001,
told a CSPAN interviewer, “I would essentially
be a kamikaze and ram
Gen. Mark Welsh
III, the Air Force’s
chief of staff, talks
with Wayne
Peacock, executive
vice president of
enterprise strategy
and marketing for
USAA, before the
San Antonio
Chamber of
Commerce’s
Military City USA
Speaker Series
luncheon at the
Depot at Sunset
Station. Using
slides and video,
Welsh outlined the
history of
American military
aviation for the
audience.
Bob Owen / San Antonio Express-News
my aircraft into the tail.”
“And I gave some
thought into would I
have time to eject? But …
you only got one chance.
I mean, you don’t want to
eject and then have
missed, right? You’ve got
to stick with it the whole
way.”
Welsh told the audience that Penney was
certain her father, United
Airlines pilot John Penney, was flying the airlin-
er, which crashed in
Pennsylvania before it
could be intercepted. It
turned out that he
wasn’t.
“Can you imagine
being in that position?”
asked Welsh, who leads
664,000 active-duty,
reserve and Air National
Guard troops.
Early in his speech,
Welsh talked of the fighter pilots who flew during
World War I, including
the first American aviators who fought in
France’s air force before
the United States entered
the war.
“They captured American attention, they captured the population
because they came back
to talk about their fighting on behalf of the
French in World War I,”
he said. “These guys
became topics of discussion around living
Atlantic hurricane season was fairly weak
By Harvey Rice
HOUSTON C HRON I C L E
GALVESTON — The
Houston-Galveston area
made it through the 2015
hurricane season with
only a single tropical
storm, but chances of a
hurricane hitting Texas
are greater next year,
weather experts said.
The hurricane season
for the Atlantic and Gulf
of Mexico ended Monday
with 11 named storms, one
shy of an average year,
said Jill F. Hasling, president of the Weather Research Center in Houston.
The only named storm
to hit the Houston area
was Tropical Storm Bill,
which in June dumped as
much as 12 inches of rain
on Matagorda and Jackson counties and contributed to at least one death
in Montgomery County.
The rain swelled rivers
and caused widespread
flooding throughout the
region, but caused far
less damage than expected.
“It was a pretty weak
hurricane season, particularly in the U.S.,” said
William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric
science at Colorado State
University and head of
the Tropical Meteorology
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Project. “Texas has been
overall relatively lucky in
recent years.”
The National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration is scheduled to
announce its annual hurricane prediction today.
The 2015 season that
started June 1 produced
four hurricanes, but only
two became major ones.
Joaquin, from Sept. 29 to
Oct. 8, was the strongest.
It reached Category 4
winds of 131-155 mph, but
stayed at sea and never
made landfall. Hurricane
Danny, from Aug. 18 to
Aug. 24, became a Category 3 for only a few
hours.
The tally did not include Patricia, a Pacific
storm that became the
most powerful hurricane
ever measured. It caused
relatively little damage
after weakening in Mexico before arriving stateside in late October.
Part of the reason hurricanes stayed away from
Texas was El Niño, a
warm band of water in
the east-central Pacific
Ocean that causes high
wind shear that makes it
difficult for hurricanes to
form, said Jeff Masters,
director of meteorology
for the Weather Underground.
The expected absence
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Morning: 4–5–6–8–9–11
12–13–14–20–22–23
Day: 2–8–10–11–12–13
14–16–17–19–22–24
Evening: 1–2–3–5–8–9
16–17–18–19–21–23
Night: 1–2–3–5–6–7
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of El Niño and the warm
waters of the Caribbean
could contribute to a busy
hurricane season next
year, Masters said.
A hurricane hasn’t
made landfall in Texas
since Hurricane Ike in
2008, which was linked
to three dozen deaths and
caused $14 billion in damage in 10 Houston-area
counties. Gray worried
that the years without a
major hurricane could
lead to complacency. “The
storms are there and they
will eventually come
back,” Gray said.
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room tables.”
The men who fought a
new kind of war quickly
became the stuff of legend.
“And fighter pilots
were dashing and incredibly handsome,”
Welsh, a command pilot
with 3,300 hours in fighters that include the F-16
and A-10, said, drawing
laughter. “Just saying.”
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SETTING IT
STRAIGHT
1 The Catholic Church’s
Year of Mercy will end
Nov. 20, 2016. The date
was incorrect in a story
on Sunday’s page K12.
1 Richard D. Bass, Ian M.
Cumming and their families own the Snowbird
Ski and Summer Resort
in Utah. The resort’s
ownership was incorrect
in a story on Sunday’s
page 5J. Also, Jeremy
Swanson of the Aspen
Chamber of Commerce
should have been credited
for the photo on page 6J.
1 The Sudoku puzzle
solution was inadvertently left out of the Nov. 22
and Nov. 29 mySA Sunday sections. Here are the
solutions for those two
days.
Nov. 29
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